Frances Fitzgerald (Dublin Mid West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Yes. The provisions in 18A and 18D of section 56 are very carefully balanced to address the issue, which is that we want to enable children to have meaningful relationships with both parents. The mechanisms we have here seek to change a parent’s behaviour, obviously not to penalise the child. It would be very traumatic for a child if a member of the Garda were to enter the house and remove the child by force to bring him or her to the other parent. We clearly want to see a situation where the court has increased powers to ensure that the parents are not in contempt of court and that they do carry out what the court intended in relation to the access issues we are talking about. The existing enforcement orders do provide for quite a number of approaches. I will not go through them all but they are listed under section 56(4)(a), (b) and (c)(i)(ii)(iii) and 123, which I believe gives the court extra opportunities which do not exist at present to ensure that the terms of access are met by both parents. That is the intention. Of course there will be circumstances where a parent may simply be in contempt of court. I was advised that community service is an alternative to prison and therefore a prison sentence would have to be specified in the first place before a person could be asked to do community service as an alternative.

The other influencer in terms of how we approached this section was the strong representations made to the committee by the Ombudsman for Children, who said that we should not adopt this approach to access. She advised very strongly against removing those sanctions, as did other organisations such as One Family, and Women’s Aid also made comments in relation to the sanctions.

This is a very difficult area in terms of trying to get parents to work well together in the best interests of the child. Sometimes, clearly parents do not act in the best interests of the child. The new mechanisms in the Bill will be helpful for courts. The broader context where this can be dealt with even more effectively is in reform of the courts, developing court welfare services to a greater degree and having more contact centres. All of those areas need development in this country as they are very under-developed at present. We have had two very good pilot projects on contact centres where very good work was done by Barnardos and other groups to help parents. In effect, they mediate with parents and make sure access visits go well. The feedback I got from Barnardos is that a very significant amount of detailed work needed to be done with parents before they could get them to the point of fully fulfilling the access, but they felt the contact centres were a very worthwhile way to approach it. We have a lot of work to do in this area to support parents to continue parenting even where there is high conflict, tension and emotion. A lot of work can be done with those parents but it does require the development of services in this area. There is much work to be done in this country in that regard. We removed the sanctions to which Deputy Shatter referred that were in the original draft on the basis I have just outlined.